The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

So there was going to be a Heresy post on Christmas Eve, but what had started as a bout of influenza turned into several other uncomfortable and non-life-threatening conditions, and the long and the short of it is that I was laid up. I'm never really "healthy," let's be honest.

Imagine if the tobacco industry had been similarly favored by Congress with a ban on federal research about cigarette deaths. Imagine, too, if the auto industry had such a shield during the years when the government successfully fought unsafe cars in the cause of public health.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

NYT's Laurie Goodstein explores how in the midst of terror attacks and fears over ISIS, "some Muslims are beginning to publicly confront the uncomfortable questions that non-Muslims have about Islam and violence, and trying to provide answers, both through words and through the example of how they live their lives."

In a feature at WaPo, Greg Jaffe looks at how President Obama's faith has informed his view of himself as a uniter, and how things haven't worked out they way he'd hoped.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Let's just put it this way: Michael De Dora kicked some serious butt for pluralism at the White House yesterday. The Know Your Neighbor campaign, designed to foster better understanding and dialogue between those of differing beliefs, was launched yesterday, and even just from the live stream I could tell that people were heartened by Michael's sincere expressions of his and our commitment to freedom of religion, expression, and thought. I'm a little surprised not to have seen more coverage of the event itself (I mean there were more powerful PR folks than myself pimping the event), but I'm hoping to see more today. At any rate, the Catholic News Agency highlighted Michael's remarks. You can watch the event here, and Michael appears on the second panel.

Some
suppose reality is divided by a veil. On this side of the veil is the
natural, observable world. Beyond the veil lies another realm - of
ghosts and spirits, angels and demons, and of course gods. These beings
are supposed to inhabit an unobservable, supernatural realm that science
can't touch...

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

THIS IS A BIG DEAL: CFI has been selected to join a coalition of faith-related groups for a campaign aimed at increasing understanding among people of differing beliefs: the Know Your Neighbor Campaign. Today at 1pm ET, CFI's Michael De Dora will be at the campaign's kickoff event at the White House. You can watch the live stream here. Importantly, CFI is the only group in the coalition to represent the secular/atheist/skeptic/"nones" perspective, and we're honored to do so.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

At last night's GOP debate, there was a lot of argument about things like banning Muslims, killing the families of terrorists and ISIS members, and carpet bombing. And while a lot of the arguments against such things were grounded in constitutional issues, treaties, and whether or not these things made us "safe," I don't think I heard anyone say anything like, "We shouldn't do those things because they are really wrong and immoral." Just bad tactics. Alas.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Stephen Law, our CFI–UK provost (because of course he deserves a fancier title than "director"), has two new pieces up. One is at Aeon magazine, where he explores why people are "remarkably prone to supernatural beliefs and, in particular, to beliefs in invisible agents." And at the CFI blog, he offers five ways atheists and the religious might find ways to constructively discuss their differences. Among them, he suggests that honesty is the best policy:

I for one would much rather understand what my intellectual opponent really believes about me than have them disguise it. After all, if a Christian really believes that, as an atheist, I am hell-bound, they surely have a moral duty to warn me.

I
occasionally am contacted by people who have read my books and articles or seen
me on TV and have follow-up questions. Here is a recent e-mail I got that
touches on the practical aspects of ghost investigations.

“The Jewish community, collectively, has that institutional memory, and institutional scars from previous events in history where a group based solely on religion was persecuted,” said Lee Cowen, a Republican strategist, adding that Trump was damaging the party.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Dear tells the court he's guilty, declares himself "a warrior for the babies." The San Bernardino killers, meanwhile, seem to have been planning an attack as far back as 2012.

There have been an alarming number of articles about Americans being awful to Muslims in the past couple of days. This woman lectured and then threw coffee at Muslims praying outside, and hit the guy filming her. In Queens, a Bangladeshi shopkeeper is beaten by a guy who allegedly says he was there to "kill Muslims."

A recent three-day conference in Washington DC focused on the ethics of "gene editing" technologies. The "stay-the-course" conclusion to continue to not experiment on viable human embryos and germline cells makes good scientific and ethical sense given the state of the art and our current knowledge on genetics.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

There was no Heresy on Friday because I was slammed with the flu. The irony is that I have long been allergic to the flu vaccine, but there's a new one without the allergen, and so this year I got my first flu vaccine in something like 25 years. Still got the flu. A doozie of a flu, which I am still suffering from. I think this means that all science is invalid, and that it's time to choose a really out-there religion.

Our own Joe Nickell is front and center in this VICE video piece on the alien myths around Roswell. It's really a great piece, featuring lots of familiar folks including Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier, and where Joe is referred to by a UFO researcher as a "nasty, noisy, negativist." Check this out, it's great.

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

Another mass shooting. I'm going to have to put a shortcut for that phrase in my TextExpander. 14 dead, 17 wounded at least. Details and motives aside, one could not have been on Twitter last night and not been struck by the sudden backlash against the "thoughts and prayers" cliche always uttered by politicians and cultural figures, particularly those who have been more or less the water carriers for the NRA. But things went farther: for every politician who offered the "thoughts and prayers" platitude, ThinkProgress's Igor Volsky would retweet them and attach whatever the gun lobby has given to them. One typical example was:

Got $3,000 from NRA during the 2014 election cycle. Unlikely to address gun problem with anything other than prayer https://t.co/lQ1CxtNnk4

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities.

I was off for a few days, so, uh, what I miss?

Oh look! CFI joined up with some other Super Important organizations (USCIRF, Lantos Foundation, PEN) to hold a Capitol Hill briefing yesterday with Bangladeshi-American humanist Bonya Ahmed, survivor of the machete attack that took the life of her husband Avijit Roy. The AP covered it, but, like, somehow forgot to mention us. (This is where I get very Dangerfieldian.) However, and probably more importantly, the event was covered by major outlets in Bangladesh (The Daily Star and BDNews24), with us included.